Maybe they think the country looks different -- heavily "moderate" but with a strong conservative presence.
The ‘moderates’ also tended to be the people with more elite pretensions and money and were conservative only on tax policy. That has changed in the last 8/10 years.
Maybe not changed in the way you think. "Moderate" thirty years ago meant pro-abortion. Today, Republicans who get tagged with the "moderate" label are a lot less likely to have those views. It's not just some old WASP country club elite any more.
The majority of Repus hate government and want it smaller now and probably half are also social conservatives.
It's fashionable to talk that way because Republicans are out of power. But do you really "hate" government? All experience suggests that when Republicans get the White House back, a lot of that "hate government" talk will dissipate.
A group the party hacks cannot believe exist in such numbers and will not view with anything but hatred.
Projection? These are voters the "party hacks" need. There's disagreement, but not much hatred.
Now for the rest. Yes i do really hate most government. I spent years working for the feds and even though I worked for one of the legitimately Constitutional functions by the time I left i figured 70% of our activity was just wasting the dollars that somebody actually worked to earn. I despise the lazy undemanding bloated public school bureaucracy that consumes half of my fairly high real estate taxes and can never explain in any understandable manner what its test standards are and produces people who have no clue about what the Constitution says or what the origins are and why it was established as a ‘negative grant of rights’ other than thinking the Preamble to the Declaration is part of the Constitution. Yes I do hate many of the pieces of the federal government, BATF with its fascist mentality and utter contempt for the rights of US citizens, the FBI with its endless pretensions of godlike capacity and its thuggish operational code, the sheer illegality of the actions of most Federal Attorneys, the damned EPA with its overweening arrogance and conceit that i have enduring in dealing with them in intrafederal relations. I can only imagine what they are like in dealing with citizens who have violated or they feel have violated any of their sacred rules which they consider to be like the laws of the Medes and Persians to be eternal and immutable.
Yes i do hate the generations of trolls from the Treasury and the Fed like Geithner and Paulson and Bernake who have debauched our currency and destroyed it as a measure of value and devoured huge amounts of savings of average citizens through their playing god with the dollar. Mostly I hate government for its endless perversion of the limited government maximum individual freedom model the Founders gave us. I hate it because those in DC or the 57 state capitals or thousands of city and county government centers those who serve in government truly feel they are our rulers and not the citizens servant.
Now as for Rove & Co. Yes they do despise rank and file Americans who do not play the role of appropriately grateful serf which is how they see the power equation. One really does have to live in DC for a while to imbibe the haughty contempt that town has for ‘average Americans’. A phrase that drips with condescension and dismissal by those who believe they are a true governing elite. Their idea is that the ‘silent majority’ is supposed to stay silent, vote as told by their betters and not disturb the smooth flow of deal making and boon peddling that is the true mother's milk of the DC political culture.